Friday, October 24, 2008

Return to the 'Burgh, OOPSLA

So after the whole wedding thing, I went to Nashville, TN for OOPSLA 2008. I didn't get to spend a whole lot of time exploring the city, which is really too bad. It actually reminded me a lot of Austin, TX. They have a big street there called Broadway where every single bar has free live music every night, and even during the day. Not only that, but it was mostly older-style country music, which really sounds cool. We only heard one band, but it was great! I also ate plenty of BBQ.

But of course I was really there for the conference. I gave a talk at the doctoral symposium, where I present a mini proposal talk to a bunch of researchers who are not my advisor. I got some really good feedback which I even incorporated into my research talk. That was on Wednesday. I was pretty nervous leading up to my real talk, but I practiced a lot (a lot!) of times. When it came time to give it, I wasn't really nervous at all. I even got some questions that weren't too hard to answer, and a bunch of people came up to tell me that they liked it. That was good! I put my slides up on my presentations page. The full paper should be up on the ACM portal soon, but isn't yet.

Finally, there were a ton of people from my research group there, along with George who flew in from CO. It was great to be there with everyone and it kind of felt like our research group was taking over, in a way. Three people in my group won awards at the conference! Congratulations dudes! Now I'm back home, and trying to figure out what to do about this whole research thing... Gotta get cracking.